You might have noticed that “giveaway” special banners, lets cut to the chase and shed some light on this thing. On average we get about 3 SEO work estimations per week, needless to say many of those requests do not see the light of day, and some relationships never make it past the proposal, during the past months we kind of started thinking that it was much more about the cost of the SEO work, and not its value.

To explain, lets just say that the value of being ranked on the top spots for the main selling keywords that describe a product or service is in 99% of all the cases we saw so far a killer (meaning a very good business thingy) and drives sales and brand recognition to new heights, however a business just starting to get a feel for internet traffic and possibilities might not have the faith that it will actually happen, and due to lack of vision or funds (or both) decide to skip the SEO (or as we now like to call it – Website/Internet Promotion)  altogether.

And for this reasons we decided that we will give away (free) SEO reviews, this means that we will go over a complete site, and provide our in-depth expert review on it (on search engine optimization, usability, keyword targeting, market positioning and even some competitive insight) for 2 (that’s two) sites, for two different businesses.

If you wish to try your luck and see if you will be one of the lucky two site, just add a comment to this blog, ask to be included and add your name and email, we do not publish these comments so no need to worry about your name getting out there, we also keep all our client information confidential, so no need to worry about us telling anyone about your business as we research and write our review.

We start reviewing the requests on November 2nd 2009, and will choose the two winners by November 30th, the reviews will be completed by the end of December 2009 (although there is a change it will take a little more time if the sites are big).

This has been one busy week, and two blog posts from Derek Powazek made me think long and hard about that thing called SEO, and how many people abuse it and slowly label it as sophisticated spamming or con art. At first I was upset at the very personal and aggressive nature of the posts, but after as while started to think of the reasons such a well known person would lash out like that an rant about SEO’s, this week provided more than enough samples to show me why he did that.

Powazek's Rant - Has A Point

SEO has a place in the world, it is an honorable and difficult professionals game, it did initially spread out from web development and mixed into marketing eventually to require enough resources and attention to be its own trade. However a quick search in Google or on Twitter will show you thousands of expert SEO’s and internet marketing gurus, some fresh out of high school (not that I am saying there are no young geniuses out there, but I noticed 15 in a 5 minute search), with that explosion of so call experts it is sure that the lame person would call this for it is – con art.

In the beginning of the internet age, or at least when I started using it back in 1993 anyone who could have created an HTML page and upload it to the internet was considered a genius, no one argued with that person, and no one negotiated too long for rates, people treated it like some magic thing… someone would work at him desk for a while et voila! a page was born. As time passed people learned that like everything else there are levels and ranks in any profession, and applied it to web design and development, SEO is at that stage right now, many people call themselves SEO’s but are cons, many say they know SEO but really know only a little HTML (like how to change title tags) and they all are very happy to give themselves the title of an Search Engine Optimizer Expert.

Who suffers the most? the real honest SEO’s out there. Because if this continues, just like Derek explains in his post, SEO will be a very bad word to be associated with, it might already be one.

The way to change SEO and the way it is perceived by the market is probably by doing an honest job and teaching people what a real SEO can and should do, which is a very wide service compared to link bombing, comment spamming and light HTML editing.

Work Hard and Show the world What's Good SEO

A couple of days ago I read this very interesting post about the holiday online shopping trends on search engine land which reminded me that traffic is on its way, and that all of us should better start get ready for it, optimize and make sure everything is working properly, because if its not, well, we will lose some money…

This photo gave a boost to mt thoughts, when clients do not get served, they LEAVE.

Get ready for them, dont let them wait and leave

In this first post on our newest category “building Trophico” I will explain the ideas and concepts that led to the creation of the main site, for our search engine optimization services and local SEO work.

At the beginning it was clear that we will need a site that will serve mostly potential clients that got word of our service via other current or past clients, in the past we had many potential clients approach us and always felt it would be a good thing to have an introductory web site that would present the ideas of Trophico SEO to newcomers and potential future clients.

Our work philosophy, who we are and what we had done in the past, case studies and some stats were the things we felt must be in this site, but we also wanted the site to project the creative spirit and the up to date – state of the art work environment we invest an believe in so much, so ideas started flowing, and we will get to them later.

At the base of the foundation for this site we asked ourselves this main question, who is going to visit this site, what will that visitor look for and why she visited in the first place. The answers needed to be simple and easy, so we set them as follows -

Who visits? Companies and people in need of search engine optimization services, businesses or people that have a web site and would like to get more out of it.

What will the visitor look for? information on SEO, information about what is Trophico, how we work, how responsible are we and how much experience we have, are we creative and flexible or are we going to dictate a list of changes and what have we done in the past.

Why did they visit? this proved to be the most important question of all, there were many answers to this one, but we choose this one – “Because someone told them we are professional search engine optimizers and that we could help”.

And that got us started on a Promotional site.

On the next post – what is a promotional site, and does Trophico SEO deliver the goods.

One thing caught my eye today, a (very) intersting paper by Mr. Edelman of Harvard university suggests that there should be some kind of governing rule over advertised material on the internet, and studies Google’s pay per click system with some pretty insightful remarks. The paper can be read here, and is absolutly something each serious PPC advertiser should look at, if only just to have an idea of the beggining of the revolution in the way consumers look at the internet.

The main thing that is clear after looking at this document is that many people out there are starting to doubt the deliverables of the advertising networks, the worth of the clicks and what should be added to the deal, this marks the end of the Google worshiping and begins an era of savvy business making. I hope the good people of Google are noticing this and taking notes (I’m sure that they are), because very soon their potential clients will start to have demands and requests.

So consumers are getting lazy, picky and choosy, they want better billing and better reporting, more control of the clicks and knowledge of where they came from and all of that, does it actually mean anything for us little PPC advertisers?

Yes. and in a big way. This is an idea, but not only an idea, it is coming from the upper side of town from an upscale university and served as a conclusion of a serious study and research, these kind of ideas are spreading fast, and with them the way the internet is running its ads.

The more the word SEO appears in blogs, papers and magazines the more people doubt that it is a serious business, and surprisingly enough the people in (the all mighty) Google are not backing up this specific part of the industry but rather treating SEO as some freak misunderstood child.

Basic search engine optimization is something anyone can do, anyone being most people who know how to work on a computer and have the energy and time to invest in learning search engine behavior. The most popular claim I can see these days (against professional SEO) is that its not needed, that webmaster should do thier own optimization and not use “the black power”.

Why am I upset to read these things? simple, take one example, one of the very clever people of Google drives his car to work and discovers that there is a strange noise in the engine, does that person take the day off and parks his car in his garage to investigate the source of the problem? surely he is capable of some minor technical car engineering. Maybe this person even likes to work on cars on the weekends, but this is a work day, and this person has other things to do, mainly work. If he starts treating his car, his work does not get done, he probably knows more about what he does daily than car maintnance. See my point?

Another example (and last one), a project manager for Yahoo! loves to bake, one of the things that makes him calm and happy is to work on a new recipe for bread and share it with the family, but on most mornings you will find this person eating a bought bread and not making his own, even though he has the latest and coolest gadgets for bread making.

We all use experts, on a daily basis, and we expect these experts to help us solve problems fast and efficiently, why is search engine optimization any different?

A SEO expert should approach this differently, and again this can change dramatically from one situation to the next, for example planning a client project is not like planning a self promotes affiliate project, and to make it easy for us lets say it’s an affiliate offer the SEO expert wants to promote.

The SEO expert would be wise to set the plan to work within a frame of time, with a few finished projects under his belt the expert could asses how long it would take to organically rank for a term (considering the competition, market saturation and other factors) lets say 5 months from day one is the time frame. A 5 month work plan can allow the SEO expert to start low (building a site, promoting it on low fire and checking after one month) and increase to a medium effort by end of month #2. if by end of month #3 there are no results at all the SEO expert will probably have to put in everything he got for something to work within a month, or the project is dead.

Now the plan comes into effect, and this is the beauty of actually making a plan.

A plan can show you if you failed or succeed, if you were unrealistic as to the results you could achieve or you have been selling yourself short. The most important thing is that a project does not get forgotten and left alone, with no lesson learned, and no real shot at success.

At month #4 it is time to take a long hard look at the goals and the results and make a decision, is this project a failure , does it indicate that there is a chance of success but further work or research is needed, or had it already proved success and results?, the time saver here is that you are working towards something, that you do not forget your goals and targets (because 4 months is a very long time in internet marketing) and that you judge your results carefully, so you can make the most of them, and in the worst case simply learn what made this a project that didn’t fly.

So far for the SEO expert, the business owner has to set the goals according to the time frame she thinks a project should and could get results by. The next step would be to research and find a SEO expert that would help her business get the natural search vision up and running, and that could take a long time, especially if the business owner is going to approach a few SEO experts for proposals.

Plan Execution - on the road

This title is not stating the obvious, as I think many of the reader would assume. In SEO it is not uncommon to discover through light conversation with someone that a whole campaign or project was built around the “see what sticks” philosophy, and without dismissing the mere idea of success through careful monitoring and testing the notion that you build something to only later follow its (relative) success seems like a completely crazy thing to waste time on.

Planning is the first setp to Success

Have you ever watched Tiger Woods make a near perfect chip that ends on the tip of the cup and commented, “ah, that was just luck”, no it wasn’t. It was a result of many hours of playing, practicing and thinking about how a shot like that needs to be taken, and just to prove how much planning goes into it watch his famous Masters 2002 chip and his recent 18^th hole British Open chip and see that it is consistent (if 7 years results can show anything I guess it would be consistency). Same thing goes for businesses, careful planning (and execution) is not the heart of the matter, it is the heart and the sole of it, in fact, it is everything with the exception of the executing functions.

So if you are an SEO or a business owner looking to get some more out of a site or a web page, your best shot at success would be to sit down with a pen and paper, and plan.

What would you plan? At the very first you should just set your goals and match some expectations, in the SEO world expectations refer almost exclusively to ranking and time, goals can be very fluid (from traffic to sales to branding force), the best practice here is different for SEO’s and business owners.

A business owner would probably turn to an expert for advice and execution of the plan, and because it is not up to the owner herself to get the results it would make sense if she would just focus on the simple “what” and “when” issues. What do you want to rank for, and how much time would you allow a SEO project to go on before it shows results.

More on the steps taken by both SEO experts and Business owners, in the next time.